


The Color of Love

by enjolraes



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:49:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enjolraes/pseuds/enjolraes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Just relax." Obi-Wan sounds bored, like this fight is just another thing that he has to get done on his laundry list today.</p>
<p>Anakin's voice is more panicked. "What about Padmé?" </p>
<p>Obi's tone is even more sarcastic than before. His eyes flicker up to where Padmé sits poised on top of the pillar, ready to strike back. "She seems to be on top of things." </p>
<p>Padmé usually is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Color of Love

It starts on Tatooine. 

Before this, it was whispers. Tidbits passed at night between Padmé and Sola, her sister older than her by a few years, sneaking back in through the window at night, smelling of oranges and smoke from the cantina, buried deep in Naboo's capital.

"Just wait," Sola said giddily, holding Padmé's hands in hers. "Wait until you fall in love."

"What does it feel like?" Padmé whispered back, half drunk on the forbidden concept. She has just been chosen to be queen. She will go through coronation tomorrow. Her heart must lie with her planet, and nothing else.

Sola's smile cuts lighter than the moonlight. 

"Freedom." 

 

For a year, Padmé rules with thought of little else but her planet. She doesn't have room in her heart to love anything else than Naboo and justice. The Trade Federation began to encircle not only her planet, but all of those under the ruling of the Galactic Senate. She is chin-deep in plans and secrets and worry. She doesn't have time.

Sola visits every other weekend, stealing Padmé away, if only for an hour. She's married now, and has a bump in her stomach she doesn't try at all to disguise. She glows even more than she did back on those forbidden nights, dancing through the window with the promise of love on her lips, her cheeks aching from smiling. 

Sola holds both of Padmé's hands in hers like she has since they were children. "You serve for four years," she says, a dangerous smile quirking up the corners of her mouth. "After that, you can have some fun." 

Padmé smiles recklessly, a mirror of her sister. She's always been made more careful, her heart treated by everyone around her like it's something holy, and she can't afford to lend pieces of it out to anyone. She lends out pieces of pragmatism instead. (Everyone says she's the best queen the planet has ever had. There's talks of the government adapting their constitution to let her rule longer.) 

"Fourteen, and already grown up," Sola remarks one day as the sun is setting. "You've always been the smart one." 

Padmé wants to say that all she is is a war of head versus heart. She doesn't. 

 

She ends up on Tatooine months later, stubbornness etched into every feature of her face. She was warned against coming, warned against the danger of the Hutts, who were vicious and sadistic and a much more raw danger than the Trade Federation. In politics, everything, even danger, is spoken with eloquent tones. Padmé would choose a dagger-worded fight any day. 

She follows Master Qui-Gon and his padawan, Obi-Wan, across the tan planet. Here, everything is sand. It feels like restlessness swirled into an endless desert and twin suns, that beat down relentlessly. Twice as hot. 

They step in for shelter and a boy runs up, his skin tanned, his hair light as the planet itself. His eyes are blue, and beat with the same ferocity that the twin suns do. 

"Are you an angel?" 

Padmé's heart skips a beat. "What?"

"An angel. They're the most beautiful creatures in the whole galaxy." 

Padmé smiles. (She learns that the boy's name is Anakin and that he's a pilot. That he loves his mother more than anything in this life, that he wants to up and leave Tatooine, that he has invisible chains binding him here.) 

"You're a slave?" she asks, horror creeping into her voice.

His gaze is all fire. "I'm a person, and my name is Anakin." 

She furrows her brow. She's a person too. Not just a piece on a chessboard, even if that piece is the queen.

 

The war rages on. Padmé's back home, and she knows it's nearing its end. She announces she is Queen Amidala and reunites the Gungans and her people. She saves the palace, with the help of her two Jedi Knights and her people, and Anakin. She is writing the orders now, giving them out with her strictly taught diplomacy. Qui-Gon is dead, and Obi's face is like its made of marble, now slightly cracked. Padmé wants to tell him she knows what invisible fracture lines feel like. She doesn't. Obi-Wan is to train Anakin, his sandy hair shorn in the padwan haircut; a tiny braid sprigs from behind his ear. He looks like one of them now, blended into the fold, but his eyes still blaze with a barely contained ferocity. Padmé wants to tell him she knows what it feels like to burn. She doesn't.

She stays there while Anakin and Obi-Wan leave, off to begin Anakin's training. The last two years of her rule pass quietly, even while whispers of unrest in the Galactic Senate find their way to her. She's tired. She wants nothing but justice, and is willing to fight for it, but she's homesick. The castle is beautiful, but it's no homestead.

Sola still visits.

"My baby sister," she says, touching her fingers to Padmé's cheek. "Don't forget how to love in this place. Be passionate." 

Padmé is passionate. She just doesn't allow her heart into battles that must be fought with her head. It's what she was always taught. Planet first, Padmé second.

In this way, she knows what it must feel like to be a Jedi. Compassionate, but not passionate. Their hearts locked in a cage, allowed out only for others. 

She thinks of Anakin every night before she falls asleep, his eyes so bright and fierce, his heart worn on his sleeve. She prays training doesn't take that away from him. 

 

A few years pass. Padmé traded the palace for the Senate; Naboo for Coruscant. Sola writes, now pregnant with her second child. Padmé likes it here, the power of the people around her vibrant and vibrating. She can taste it in the air too, along with the hum of neon signs and the never ending bustle of air traffic. She misses home though, with the rolling green fields and endless beaches and water that shines as bright as the sun. 

On Coruscant, the days bleed into another, quick and seamless as a rolling tide. Padmé watched the Jedi pass by her in the Senate halls, and lets her thought drift childishly to Anakin. He must be nearly an adult now, grown up, but hopefully no less passionate. He's unlike anyone else Padmé has ever met. Maybe that's why she cannot keep her thoughts from him, even now, years later. 

Padmé's being attacked and that weariness of being protected seeps over her like a familiar heartache. She's restless, wants to slip out of her own skin and fight back herself, like she used to be able to before she announced to the world she was the queen and her decoys only served her when she traveled. Now, they're dying in numbers, and Padmé is angry. 

"My dear," Palpatine says after her arrival in Coruscant after returning home briefly to confer with Queen Jamilla, "Please, let us protect you. I couldn't stand the thought of anything happening to you." His voice is an ounce too syrupy, and her heart flares up as a warning sign. She swallows it down and agrees. 

Obi-Wan is assigned to protect her, him and his padawan. The day of their arrival, Padmé paces around restlessly in her bedroom, toying with the necklace Anakin had carved for her all those years ago after leaving his home behind. She thinks of him, little boy so unabashedly in love with her. She thinks of him now, most likely carried swiftly through the years. 

She's right: the elevator doors open and she spots Obi-Wan first, his face shattered just a little bit more with those fracture lines than he was ten years ago. His hair is long now, and he smiles at her briefly before her eyes dart to the man standing next to him.

"My, Ani... You've grown!" She exclaims, hoping her heart beating rapidly isn't audible to everyone else in the room. He has grown -- his eyelashes longer than her thumbnail; his blue eyes piercing and dangerous. He's taller than she is by three heads, and his body is lean and his shoulders look like they could take up the whole room. 

They discuss the attacker, Anakin promising he'd catch who was after her, his heart still fierce, even after ten years of Jedi training. His eyes linger on her for too long to be necessary, and Padmé hates how she excites at the way can feel them tracing her body. Before the sun even goes down, she says goodnight, and before she does, she leans in close to Anakin, whispering "use me as bait." His eyes flash dangerously. She bites her lip to keep from smiling, and retreats into her bedroom, hand over her lips as if he has just pressed his to them. She thinks of Sola, of saying that falling in love feels like freedom.

Padmé's heart is flighty. She wishes she could fly along with it. 

 

Padmé dreams uneasily the next couple of nights, waking every morning with her cheeks flushed and her calm composure coming undone. It's dangerous, to want a man who she cannot have, the reasons endless. All she's been taught is to pit her head and her heart against each other, that they can never have the same thing. She must always be at war, but now she doesn't want to to fight. She doesn't want to fight _this._ She wants Anakin.

So she tells him she can't love him. "It'd be living a lie," she says by the fire back on Naboo a few weeks later, time passing in colors flying by. A few days ago, they were rolling around in her favorite field, the whole world just the two of them. She had perched on top of him, feeling simultaneously reckless and powerful. "One we couldn't keep, even if we wanted to." (She wants to. He wants to. Both of them burn hotter than the fire.) "Could you live like that?"

"No," he says, and the lie burns white hot on his mouth. She can taste it, even feet away. 

That is that. Until of course, Anakin dreams of his mother and is drawn to Tatooine again, his heart beating too fast in his chest. Padmé assures him it's okay, it's okay, and she will come with him. She does. 

His face is harder set than she's ever seen it, determined and loving and scared. She wants to reach up and press her thumb to his forehead; softening out the crease there. She doesn't. 

Anakin returns with Shmi, bloody and bruised and halfway broken, miraculously still alive. His voice is searing when he tells her he killed every last one of the creatures who did this to his mother, his eyes alight. "I killed them," he says, and it sounds like absolution. Padmé watches him move fluidly around the basement, hurling tools around. She knows she should be horrified. Part of her is. Part of him loves him more, now, even as danger creeps around all of his edges.

Anakin has fracture lines too. His are more visible than hers are.

 

They receive a distress call from Obi-Wan on Geonosis, and Padmé sets course for there immediately against Master Windu's orders. Anakin's smile when she tells him she's going to save Obi is one that burns across his face, hot and alive. He leaves his mother with his stepfather and stepbrother, and she holds his face before they go. "Be brave," Shmi says quietly, an echo of ten years before.

"Let me take the lead out there," Padmé says when they land. "I'm not interested in getting into a war here." Wars. She's tired of them. 

"Don't worry," Anakin assures her, as he follows right behind her, his fingertips barely glancing off of hers. "I've given up trying to argue with you." 

They get captured as well, and Padmé closes her eyes for a second as they're being wheeling to an arena, beige and orange. So this is how she's going to die, surrounded by the Trade Federation and beating wings. She doesn't want to die a liar.

"Don't be afraid," Anakin whispers to her as they get chained to the cart.

Padmé looks back at him unflinchingly. "I'm not afraid to die." 

Her voice is brazen, matter-of-fact. It's now or never. "I've been dying a little more each day since you came back into my life." 

Anakin turns to her, his face bright even in this darkness. "What?"

"I love you," Padmé says, the confession tumbling out of her lips before she can even think to hold it back. It's been ten years in the making. 

"You love me?" Anakin asks, turning the words over in his mouth like they're something holy. "I thought we had decided not to fall in love. That we would be forced to live a lie, and it would destroy our lives." 

Padmé blinks back tears of regret, of letting her head win so many times before, of wishing this was a repetition of words said to Anakin many times before. "I think our lives are about to be destroyed anyways," she says quietly. "I truly... deeply... love you, and before we die, I want you to know." 

Anakin presses his lips to hers, and it's urgent and needy and she locks her jaw into place as she pulls away, eyeing Obi-Wan chained to a pillar. His eyes are both wry and echoing a ghost of a smile. 

"We got your distress call," Anakin says. "Then we decided to come and rescue you." 

Padmé steps off of the cart, her mouth working around a hairpin she had pulled from her bun before they got captured. She hears Obi-Wan say "Good job" as he looks up at where his hands are pinned together on the pillar above him. His voice is dripping with sarcasm. 

They begin the fight to their deaths, and Padmé has begun to climb up the pillar, hairpin locked between her teeth. 

"Just relax." Obi-Wan sounds bored, like this fight is just another thing that he has to get done on his laundry list today.

Anakin's voice is more panicked. "What about Padmé?" 

Obi's tone is even more sarcastic than before. His eyes flicker up to where Padmé sits poised on top of the pillar, ready to strike back. "She seems to be on top of things." 

Padmé usually is. 

 

The battle wages on and Anakin and Obi-Wan square off against Count Dooku, and when Padmé finally arrives at their fight, Anakin is handless and Obi is fairly beaten up. She springs across the chamber to him, lips brushing his neck as she clings to him. 

"Anakin," Obi says, as the clones and Jedi fill the chamber, "if you're going to marry her, do it quietly." 

Anakin nods. Padmé looks up at Obi-Wan, hoping her gratitude is apparent in her gaze. 

"Senator," Obi says, and then chews his tongue. "Padmé," he says instead, and suddenly it's ten years ago and he is her confidant again. "Be careful." 

She nods. 

 

They marry at sunset on Naboo, in the hidden garden by the lake where their lips had met for the first time. It is quiet, with only a minister to bind them and their droids behind them. Padmé knows this is dangerous, knows that her heart is a flighty thing, knows that this is forbidden.

For once, she doesn't care. 

 

Anakin moves above her like he is fabricated from something addictive, his body slick and shiny. When he's inside of her, it's like nothing she's ever experienced before. She doesn't care about anything but him. The world fades away.

They spend a week like this, in their bedroom, in closets, in the field where they once rolled around, laughing. It feels like a lifetime ago. 

"I love you," Anakin says every chance he gets. 

"I love you," Padmé echoes, trying to channel all of his ferocity. She thinks what their children will be like; if they'll have a daughter with her complexion and his fierceness. If they'll have a son with her goodness and his features. If they'll have children at all. One night she perches atop him, his chest bare and her heart heaving. He looks up at her like she put all the stars in the sky.

"I want to stay like this forever," she says. 

"On top of me?" Anakin's lips quirk up in that cocky smile. 

_Padmé seems to be on top of things_ , Obi had said back in the arena. She always was. 

"With you," Padmé breathes, and traces her fingers across his chest. "I don't want you to leave." 

When he does, he kisses her with such fierceness it takes her a second to catch her breath. "I love you," Anakin says as he climbs aboard the ship Obi-Wan had come in to retrieve him. "I promise I'll be back." 

 

A few years pass, and Anakin comes back to her in spurts, his mind clouded and distracted, and Padmé loves him harder for it. The little boy she once knew on Tatooine is long gone, grown into a man that only echoes his former self. 

When she throws up twice in a row, she sends for Sola. Her sister is delighted, and Padmé is scared. 

"What's it feel like?" Sola asks one night, both of them curled up in Padmé's bed like when they were kids.

"Freedom," Padmé says, although she's not quite sure if that's right. Liberation, maybe. "I'm afraid," she admits. 

Sola brushes Padmé's curls away from her face. "You're going to be the best mom in this world and the next," she promises. 

 

When Padmé tells Anakin, his face lights up in a way she hasn't seen since she was still queen. "This is the happiest moment of my life," he assures her, and when he kisses her, she tastes his reckless heart beating into his lips. 

She worries away her days of pregnancy as Anakin goes out and fights, and every night he returns to her, pressing a kiss to her belly and one to her mouth. "I'm going to be a father," he says in wonder, watching her stomach with childish delight.

"You're a Jedi," Padmé says once, and Anakin shakes his head so firmly his hair whips his cheeks. 

"I'm going to change the rules." 

He does, when the Council realizes Palpatine is the Sith Lord they've been looking for and Anakin brings him in chains in front of them. He tells them brazenly he's married and that Padmé is pregnant, and Yoda changes the rules, his eyes wary. Anakin reports this to Padmé that night, and Padmé can feel that Master Yoda wouldn't change the rules without reason, especially rules that had been upheld since the creation of the Jedi Order. He must have seen something in the Force that changed his mind, not just Anakin's pride. 

Padmé goes into labor not long after, and Anakin paces around so hurriedly in front of her, calling every few seconds for a medical droid, while Obi-Wan stays beside her, ever calm. Padmé gives birth to a boy and a girl, Anakin only fainting three times during the delivery. In another universe, this could have ended in fire. Here, it ends in life. 

She names the girl Leia, the name for meadow, where her and Anakin both fell headfirst into love. She names the boy Luke, and everything from his golden hair to his blue eyes bleeds that pure light. 

 

"You were right," she tells Sola, who visits her that night, cradling the twins in both arms. "It does feel like freedom." 

Palpatine - Darth Sidious - is vanquished by the time Padmé leaves the hospital, and none of the Jedi claim to know who killed him, although both Anakin and Obi-Wan are tight lipped about where they went the last few nights. 

Anakin's padawan is gentle hearted and kind eyed, and she has a quicker tongue than he does. Ahsoka loves the twins, and flits in and out of their house on Naboo like an adopted older sister. When the twins are old enough, Padmé and Anakin take them to Tatooine, where Shmi and Cliegg have decorated and baby-proofed the house. Owen and Beru are engaged, and Beru dotes on Luke. The suns still beat down hotter than ever.

"I love you," Anakin says one night when the two of them watch the suns set, Padmé nestled tightly in his arms. "More than my own life. You're my angel. I always have."

"I love you," Padmé says back, ferocity creeping up in her voice. "More than this world and the next."

 

It started on Tatooine. It could have ended there too. 

But the only fire in Padmé's life is Anakin's heartbeat, and all the danger has passed. Her heart has won, and so has the light.


End file.
